"Inequality at birth is neither just nor unjust. What's just and unjust is the way institutions deal with it" - John Rawls

"I always had a certain dislike for general principles and abstract prescriptions. I think it's necessary to have an "empirical lantern" or a "visit with the patient" before being able to understand what is wrong with him. It is crucial to understand the peculiarity, the specificity, and also the unusual aspects of the case" - Albert O. Hirschman

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Want a reform? Start with proposing the extreme

I have a theory on policy advocacy - demand the extreme. In a negotiation, the one who first compromises (a lot?) automatically forces others to compromise at least a bit, to appear fair. So, always demand the extreme. What does this mean?

For example: Take the example of powers of RBI governor. If you directly say, we should have a committee with RBI majority instead of a single person, the debate would have been around single person vs. committee with RBI majority. There is no middle ground here for both parties to settle. In such situations, the debate becomes binary and in any negotiation, no party wants to appear to have lost. So, the consensus becomes difficult.

Instead, the other way to do it is, propose a committee with government majority. This time, instead of debate on single person vs. committee with RBI majority, there will be a debate on who should have majority in the committee, pushing the point of debate to the right. In the end, you agree to budge from the proposal of committee with govt majority to a committee with RBI majority. This would make opponents happy to have made you budge and you too have achieved your initial goal.

Nothing big. Usual principle of bargaining in roadside shops. Start with lowest possible and say - I have compromised this much, so you should at least compromise something.

The other example of this tactic is the JEE reform by Sibal. Initially Sibal made an extreme proposal, IITs didn't agree to it but Sibal was adamant about it. In the end, in order to resolve the debate, a middle path was proposed, which finally ended up pushing IITs from their original position.